Erasing Details Of Bad Memories 135
An anonymous reader writes "People can be trained to forget specific details associated with bad memories, according to breakthrough findings that may lead the way for the development of new depression and post-traumatic stress disorder therapies. New study (abstract), published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, reveals that individuals can be taught to forget personal feelings associated with an emotional memory without erasing the memory of the actual event."
Why bother with roofies anymore? (Score:2, Insightful)
Rohypnol: that's soooo 2001.
Slashdot? (Score:2, Insightful)
What the hell's that?
These bad memories can be replaced with good ones (Score:3, Insightful)
A little worried about this (Score:5, Insightful)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind... (Score:1, Insightful)
Risking apathy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Both good for the individual & bad for society (Score:5, Insightful)
PTSD is reassuring for me in a way - if humans were truly naturally murderous beasts, as some would like to insist, PTSD would be very rare or non-existant. But it isn't, and we're not built for heinous acts - more bonobo than chimp, as it were.
The trick is, if PTSD is 'curable' then there are even fewer consequences for sending in men to do terrible things to other people. We're already learning that the lower the domestic cost of war is, the more politicians engage in it. I don't want veterans to suffer, but this is all headed in the wrong direction.
Re:Both good for the individual & bad for soci (Score:2, Insightful)
Rofl fantastic. You're opposed to medicine because it will make people more willing to fight as well, right?
Violence is morally neutral. Like all tools, it is how you use it.
Re:Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind... (Score:4, Insightful)
.. also Total Recall.
Isn't this more like the exact opposite of those stories? The characters in those stories seemed to recall feelings of the events but had no other memory. TFA talks about erasing the bad emotions associated with past events, leaving the memory of the event itself intact.
Re:Risking apathy? (Score:2, Insightful)
As someone who worked hard in middle school to get rid of all his emotions (due to bullying, depression, worthlessness, etc...) I wouldn't recommend it. Everything is so-so for me. Should I pick this activity over that one? I can't say. One is never better than the other. Why do you want to try XXXX? Because I do... I can't give a reason, I can't say that I enjoy it because I don't. I can't say that I don't want to do that other activity because I don't like it, because I don't. It's difficult to make choices and go through life when you don't hate and/or enjoy anything.
Sure I don't get angry at anyone/anything and you can't make me mad, but you also lose everything worth living for. Risking apathy isn't worth it to remove bad memories. Take it from a guy who took that trade off to prevent future (now past) bad events.
Re:These bad memories can be replaced with good on (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you know how much it scares the shit out of anyone living with me when I wake up screaming, even after the fourth or fifth time?
So I'm not a veteran and I wasn't abused or anything like that, but it doesn't change when my ex-father attacks me and starts breaking every bone in my body and I wake up screaming. The only reason my subconscious won't let go is because I actually trusted and thought I loved that fundamentalist, racist, delusional, conspiracy-theory-loving piece of crap for 18 years, and then he broke that trust.
Veterans need this. You think Goatse or Two Girls One Cup can't be unseen?
I just wake up screaming every now and then if I haven't had my dose of b33r after a couple days. It's nothing more than that.
I don't even know what real post traumatic stress syndrome is like. I've never seen someone killed, and I've never had to kill someone or be killed myself.
That was abuse. (Score:3, Insightful)
So I'm not a veteran and I wasn't abused or anything like that, but it doesn't change when my ex-father attacks me and starts breaking every bone in my body and I wake up screaming.
That was abuse - very severe physical abuse.
It's quite smart of you to not want to base your identity on being a victim and wallowing in your past, but then again, I don't think you shouldn't be afraid to call it for what it was.
Re:Midazolam (Score:4, Insightful)
That article quotes a suicide rate of 468, from an armed forces contingent of 1.5M or 3M if you include reservists (which the 468 figure does include). That means that 0.015% of the US military commits suicide, which puts them at around 15 times the national average. That doesn't necessarily imply a causal relationship. Several reasons come to mind immediately why they would be expected to have a higher suicide rate than the general population:
Most people in the USA who commit suicide do so with a firearm (around 60%). This is one of the easiest ways of killing yourself because it lets you do it quickly - giving you less time to reconsider - and is believed by most who do so to be a painless way out. At the very least it's quick.
The second reason is that a lot of army recruitment material talks about giving people a purpose or direction in life. As such, I'd expect a significant percentage of people who feel they have nothing to live for to join up (as is a recurring theme in fiction) and, if the army then fails to provide them with something that they consider to be a worthwhile purpose for suicide to seem like an attractive alternative.
Finally, there's the obvious correlation between high-stress occupations and suicide...